This invention relates generally to a user interface of a data processing system. More particularly, the invention concerns displaying data in a output fields within a panel of graphical user interface.
It is well known to provide a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to allow user to control computer system and to present their results of system operations on the display. The computer system will display information useful to the user, however, the limited display space available will not allow the system to provide all of the useful information on a single display screen. The user will generally be forced to navigate to further user interface panels to see all of the pertinent information about a particular subject. One example is a user interface designed to cover status information for a massively large computer network. A matrix, in which a plurality of cells presents a summary of status information for corresponding group of nodes, is a useful format for such graphical user interface. The size of the cells in the matrix should be designed so that it is usually sufficient to display the status data of a major portion of the nodes in the group, yet allow all of the nodes to be presented on a single display panel.
No matter how well the GUI panel has been designed, occasionally the data to be displayed in a particular output field is too long to be fully accommodated. One possible solution would be to reconfigure the matrix to allow the longer data to be fully displayed. However, the screen space may be insufficient for this approach. Also, it may be computationally expensive to continually redesign the matrix whenever the data becomes too long for a particular cell.
The present invention presents a solution which will allow the output fields to remain at a static size, while accommodating data longer than the cell size.